pop-up

If you've noticed today that Chrome for desktop is blocking new tabs as if they were pop-up ads, you aren't alone. It seems Google may have rolled out a server-side experiment that, when combined with a handful of different extensions, results in the anomalous, over-aggressive behavior on the part of the browser. Reports are widespread, and for now, the only workarounds are to disable the extensions that can trigger the issue, or pass an additional parameter to disable the experiment when launching Chrome. However, Google has determined the cause so a fix could be coming soon.

According to a recent blog post by the Google Retail Team, two new pop-up retail shops will be opened in New York City and Chicago, starting October 18th. The shops will last through December 31st, giving you a bit over two months minimum to check out Google's hardware in a "fully Google-made experiential space."

Shazam is getting a new function that should make it easier to manually initiate sound searches. Reader Samarth reports that he now has the option to enable a Shazam notification that, when tapped, brings up a persistent chat head-like bubble that acts as a shortcut to sound searches.

The days of native popups in browsers are long gone, but sites still frequently use in-page alerts like the one above. They are completely useless most of the time, and usually violate the Better Ads Standards (potentially causing the site to lose revenue from Chrome users). While Firefox isn't outright blocking ads on some sites like Chrome is, the browser's developers are working on a blocker for these popups.

Chrome notifications are great in theory, but now that virtually every site supports them, that constant, nagging banner under the URL bar can get annoying fairly quickly. Of course, you can always block each site individually, but that doesn't really solve the issue, since you'll still get the pop-up every time you visit a new site that supports Chrome's notifications.

The Play Store team is killing us. Over the past couple of months, we've seen so many server-side tests for interface changes that we've lost track of them all, and which ones are official and which ones are still not available to everyone. Just today we discussed a significant improvement that could have apps and games show up separately on the Store, and now we're back with another change.

The in-app purchase dialog, the one that pops-up whenever you tap on a paid item inside an app or game, might be getting an overhaul soon. Instead of the old pop-up window showing up in the middle of the screen, this new IAP menu covers the bottom of the display and uses the Play Store's new shade of green along with a big Buy button akin to the new wide buttons in app listings on the Store.

A couple of days ago, the CyanogenMod team announced via Google+ a new feature merged to CM's Jelly Bean code branch – Quick Message. In case you missed it, Quick Message is a feature (built by David van Tonder) that displays a pop-up notification upon receipt of a new SMS message, offering the ability to reply from within the pop-up, view the message in Android's Messaging app, swipe to another new message, or close the notification.

Today, van Tonder (along with CyanogenMod) announced even further enhancements to the feature, primarily influenced by user feedback, adding a "Quick reply" option to SMS messages' actionable notifications.